Tag: Donald Trump

Nicholas Kristof, of the NY Times just penned a great example of what is known as the Appeal to Emotion, logical fallacy. A logical fallacy is, in simpler terms, a false and misleading statement.

Press Puppets by Eric Allie, CagleCartoons.com

Trying to pass of false and misleading information is more commonly known as “fake news” and more aptly known as propaganda (information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular cause or point of view). By doing so, he not only hurts the reputation of the NY Times by betraying the public trust.

First, Kristof frames his argument in a predicating opinion that he considers the President a liar, though he admits this claim itself uses potentially false logic. That claim is known as an ad-homenim attack, meant to devalue the subject of discussion rather than the rationality of an argument. He wants you to hate before you know why to hate.

“In fact, this is a “pro-death” approach that actually increases abortions, as well as deaths among women.” ~ Nicholas Kristof, NY Times

Let me be clear about this. He makes a direct connection and appeals on that basis that people should rise up and contact their government in opposition of this policy. What Kristof didn’t want you to do was to read the memorandum yourself because he didn’t provide a link to it, as I did.

The Mexico City Policy is a heavily debated issue going back to 1984. There’s no doubt that it is an emotional issue in part but it’s one thing to have an emotionally charged debate and to make such a unfair appeal to charge someone as being directly responsible for the deaths of others for a decision like this. Mostly because it’s flatly a false argument by only presenting one-side.

So for sake of argument, I will concede that Kristof is right and use his same logic to disprove that Trump is waging a War on Women.

When Trump signed this memorandum he did so to prevent, in part, involuntary sterilization, which is a crime against women committed to deny them the right to have children. By fighting against this memorandum, Kristof fights for involuntary sterilization.

Funding denied to organizations that do not adhere to U.S. Law, which prevents using U.S. aide for the purposes of abortion, can be withheld and then spent on other domestic programs such as Medicaid. Taken one step further, any dollar we spend on foreign aid means less money that can be used to help fight poverty in the US. Poverty is the number one contributor to death and it affects women disproportionately to men.

So by supporting funding of foreign medical services, funds are diverted from potential programs that could help women in the US. So in reality, women will die in either case, whether or not the Mexico City Policy is followed; it really just depends on whether you want to help women who are American or not.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. ~ George Washington, Farewell Address 1796

Nicholas Kristof, has chosen a side in a war he declared. He would rather help foreign women and let American women die. He would rather support involuntary sterilization alongside abortion than help the poor in his own country. He’s willing to use women like an object as an emotionally deceitful manipulation to support the abortion industry.

If it is a choice between helping American women or foreign women, I believe it is the duty of our government to choose American women first.

I don’t care which side of the abortion issue you stand on but I would hope that you also care honesty and integrity in media. This kind of abuse of power by a journalist hurts all of us, divides us unfairly and makes it harder to have civil, rational conversations. It’s an outright betrayal of the public trust. By demonizing those you disagree with as inhuman killers you do not build bridges, create common ground for compromises or unite us in common goals; it just divides us.

So I encourage you to contact the NY Times and complain about the propaganda and bias of this columnist. Insist that, even in opinion editorials, there be an adherence to rational, critical and logical thinking rather than a dependence on rhetoric and false manipulation.

The press’s job is to inform the public. A propagandist’s job is to convince the public what to think.

Over the weekend, post-inauguration, nearly every media outlet has run some variation of a story declaring that the Trump administration has alarmingly removed all references to climate change, Latinos, LGBT and a variety of other issues. Usually these stories focus on one individual aspect of these changes, and in the case of climate change this apparently, according to the mainstream press, sent shockwaves through the scientific community.

“Scientists fear the online deletions will extend far beyond changes to introductory websites and into the realm of government data. Climate change data gathered and stored by the United States government is considered among the most authoritative in the world. But scientists worry the data will be deleted during the Trump administration.” nytimes.com

As of this writing, there were over 120 articles all using different variations of fear-mongering titles with cautionary words like “scrubbed clean”, “disappear”, “vanish”, “no more mention of”, “critical issues go missing”, “sanitizes”, “scraps”, “dropped”, “drastic”, “axes”, and various other phrases. One thing nearly every single article has in common is it’s alarming tone. Take for example the following from the Sacramento Bee:

“IT’S TRULY DISTURBING THAT ONE OF THE FIRST ACTIONS BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IS TO REMOVE NEARLY ALL REFERENCES TO CLIMATE CHANGE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE WEBSITE”
Sam Adams, US director of the World Resources Institute

With all the consistency in these headlines spread across social media, millions of people might be led to believe something machavelian is going on. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The insinuation that reading these headlines presents is that the Trump administration is specifically targeting climate change, Latinos and the LGBT and excluding these from the public dialogue or discriminating against them. It’s a lie the media seems desperate to convince the public of by making a story out of nothing.

While many of these articles do in fact mention that all of the previous information that was on whitehouse.gov has been moved to a new address at obamawhitehouse.archives.gov, they fail to mention that archive.gov is itself, the national archive. The National Archives operates as an independent agency and is run by a presidential appointee; currently an Obama appointee. While these pages and all of their content may have been taken off the White House’s website, this occurrence is nothing new. Since the establishment of whitehouse.gov in 1994, every administration has completely revised the website after the inauguration of a new president. Obama removed the entire website of the bush administration, which can still be found at the National Archives at georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov. What’s significant about differences between the transition from Bush to Obama and Obama to Trump isn’t the content of the website but the reaction of the media to those changes and the fact that the Trump administration actually kept in place features Obama launched, such as the petition site, We the People.

When the Obama administration launched it’s new administration’s website, it did so with change.gov, which is archived by the Library of Congress. Change.gov featured transition related content until the Obama administration was able to launch what became the new whitehouse.gov website. In essence, it completely removed all of the Bush doctrine language in exactly the same way that Trump removed the Obama doctrine content. What was missing during Obama’s transition was the outrage in the media over the removal of content related to Bush’s doctrine.

Maybe it just wasn’t considered newsworthy by the editors at the time; likely because it really wasn’t newsworthy. Just like it really isn’t newsworthy now, unless of-course you want to sew division, outrage, fear and hatred, in which case it makes for a great dog-whistle headline for everyone already afraid that a Trump administration is out to get them because he’s a bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, climate denying, sexual predator who’s a Russian puppet who’s going to throw all the Muslims into internment camps, in which case it’s completely justifiable news because it reinforces at least more than one of those belief’s. Then again, it could just be another nail in the coffin of the mainstream media’s credibility with the public.

Take a moment and consider that between all of the authors, editors, producers, broadcasters, anchors and pundits that opined on this one issue, all added together, there are significantly more of them than the actual number of people compelled enough to actually engage directly with the white house.

One would think that if there were so many climate change scientists outraged at this event, they might be bothered enough to fill out an online form stating their outrage. Clearly, that hasn’t happened yet but who knows, maybe they just need time to recover from the shock that Donald Trump is actually president. The apparent outrage of millions of people marching on behalf of LGBT rights and women might have taken a break from holding a sign to actually sign an online petition so they can “not allow ourselves to be erased.” but maybe they were too busy marching or burning newspaper stands to notice.

If you are one of those offended by the removal of this content, maybe you should take Donald Trump’s advice to heart?

“We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action, constantly complaining, but never doing anything about it. The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.” ~ Donald Trump Inauguration Speech, January 20th 2017

The real problem with the beliefs these headlines lead people to isn’t just that they are a false cause but that perpetuating a false cause like this can lead to the extreme views, which I cited above are becoming increasingly more common, especially among the young, and politically uninformed. Those beliefs themselves are dangerous, divisive and undermine the very fabric that unifies us as a country. These are intentional, blatantly biased and false interpretations of the facts designed to create an opinion in the mind of the reader before they are informed of the facts. It depends on a simple strategy; that people don’t actually bother reading. They read the headline, it triggers their existing biased beliefs and they share it. Rinse, repeat, recycle and you have a faux viral outrage over something that actually nothing.

This kind of click-baiting is how extremists groups radicalize people to commit terrorist acts as lone wolf actors. It’s beyond fake news, dishonest journalism or poor writing. It’s derisive and it’s an intentional attempt to sew conflict in our society. It deepens the bandwagoning that leads to civil unrest by encouraging people to believe something must be true because so many other people believe it; because it’s all over the news and we should trust the news. It is an absolute betrayal by the media of the public trust.

So if the feminist activists, social justice warriors, Hollywood stars, so called journalists and climate scientists who claim to be so offended over the changes on Whitehouse.gov aren’t willing to bother filling out the petition, maybe you should think twice about how outraged you should actually be over making something out of nothing.

When the press become propagandists, our democracy fails to function properly.

Trump’s First 100 Days: Citizen Log #2

So why are women suddenly outraged? What are they actually marching for? Watching the marches across the nation, it’s hard to actually get a real idea of what’s being protested, challenged or demanded.

In due diligence of understanding the Women’s Marches occurring in DC and across the country I’m reading the “Unity Principles” platform presented by the leadership of the protests. In essence, this is why the march is occurring and what they actually stand for.

At it’s front, the march’s objectives seems suspicious considering that the core organizers, Angela Yvonne Davis, a former leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) along with Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers, a well known communist activist organization partner with the CPUSA.

However, reading the Unity Principles, I have to say that much of what they say in their belief statements, I agree with. Some of it wholly. Though, I tend to come to odds with them as a libertarian in their objective or outcome statements. So to understand it more I read the more expanded downloadable statements, the Guiding Vision Definition of Principles. I believe it’s important to point out that this PDF download is for distribution among supporters and by not putting it on the website itself, presents a different set of arguments to the general public and another, deeper, less nuanced and more ideologically driven view that I think the general public would find appealing. This is a tactic frequently used by cults and propagandists to recruit the unsuspecting, low information supporters into a movement through incremental indoctrination.

It is, well written with a lot of very couched language that both appeals to a person’s moral sensibilities while also echoing a dog-whistle to those with more ideological extreme views. I begin to wonder if this so called movement is more than just a chaotic representation of discontent with the electoral outcome when confronted with the reality of those events or if it is in fact just a shill game to spread communist ideals on a massive scale.

Then under Worker’s Rights, I found this:

“We stand in full solidarity with the sex workers’ rights movement. We recognize that exploitation for sex and labor in all forms is a violation of human rights.”

I almost laughed out loud. Last I checked, “sex worker’s rights” are fundamentally, the right to willfully engage in prostitution and other sex related acts of commerce that are by and large, illegal in most countries. This is in direct conflict with the principle that prostitution is exploitative of women and thus a violation of human rights. So are these people marching in support of prostitution or against it? Because to me, that sounds like they want to be on both sides of the argument. So much for solidarity. This is not an issue I think most women support.

Trying not to get hung up on this dichotomy of ideology I drudged on as issue after issue became more convoluted. Then finally, their final goal was revealed.

“We recognize that to achieve any of the goals outlined within this statement, we must work together to end war and live in peace with our sisters and brothers around the world. Ending war means a cessation to the direct and indirect aggression caused by the war economy and the concentration of power in the hands of a wealthy elite who use political, social, and economic systems to safeguard and expand their power”

Let there be no confusion about this statement. The belief that conflict originates from the concentration of power in a wealthy minority is the proletariat argument against the bourgeoisie class made by Karl Marx that is the very foundation of Marxist communist ideology.

What this march is about is so convoluted and lacking in a clear objective that it really proves it’s not actually about women’s rights. It’s about politics as a whole and convincing women to sign onto a specific overall political ideology that stands in opposition of what has, for hundreds of years now been a core American principle; capitalism. It’s about equality of outcomes not inalienable rights. It is, fundamentally, anti-American in it’s core principles. It’s not about civil rights, it’s about masking a divisive political philosophy in the more publicly palatable idea of inequality and demonisation of the movement’s opposition, which is by and large the majority of America.

“To the detractors who say this march will not add up to anything; Fuck you! Fuck You!” ~ Madona, Women’s March January 21, 2017

Well, fuck me then, because I simply refuse to see any evidence that the majority of people who attended this march to show their solidarity for women’s issues would, if they bothered to read the platform they were marching for, ultimately agree with those ideas. That’s not to say that there isn’t a growing movement of anti-capitalist, Marxist ideological support within our country but ultimately it is not the unifying element. Eventually, the conflict between the totalitarianism that is necessary to support the “equality” movement will come in conflict with those who value actual freedom and liberty, many of which are themselves women, and members of liberal minority groups.

So no, this faux movement will not amount to anything because it is not about achieving anything concrete for women and eventually, women will figure that out. Moreover, it’s more likely that a Trump administration, given time, will show that it’s not the great evil this movement’s core leadership and it’s big money sponsors wants to make him out to be and as that becomes more evident, the fear-mongering will be less effective in creating the false solidarity that it currently relies on.

Maybe I’m wrong and this isn’t really about communism and instead it’s an honest movement about Women’s issues but one thing is for sure; there is no clear objective as there was with past civil rights movements like Women’s Suffrage and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. It does however seem to be one of the largest demonstrations of anti-American, anti-capitalist, pro-Marxist ideologies to ever occur in the country. It makes the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street seem both milder and more broadly appealing, though their objectives are nearly ideologically identical. Ultimately, it’s likely to have much of the same impact on society in the end, which is little.

Either that or just a lot of people are sore losers and just hate Donald J. Trump, personally as a man and would give power to communists out of their own fear, spite and hatred for him.

Let’s hope it ends peacefully. When communists and anarchists fail to get change peacfully, they usually resort to force.

Trump’s First 100 Days – Citizen Log #1

Possibly for the first time since Millard Fillmore in 1850, we have a president who, while he may be a Republican by party, is truly an independent. There is very little about Trump’s policy platform that is actually Republican. Trump himself has been largely, for most of his life, a liberal and a Democrat. He has taken more public action in support of the LGBTQ community than any other top political figure in American History yet he is attacked by and feared by most members of the community. Fear is a powerfully strong force to overcome once people have it. It detracts from the very fact that during his inauguration something historic actually happened. For the first time, at least in my lifetime, there were four of six living U.S. Presidents in attendance. It probably would have been five, but George H. W. Bush was in the hospital. This unprecedented event wasn’t the only historic thing that happened. Trump, during his inaugural speech severely chastised the “establishment” for it’s corrupt, selfish, ineffective and ultimately criminal governance. This wasn’t a partisan attack from the right against the leadership of the left or a rhetorical demonetization of the right by those on the left, this was an refutation not only of the Obama administration but all of the sitting presidents, congressman and legislators of our government.

It was a moment I will, forever be glad that happened. Though, I’m not sure it will truly amount to much, it is a moment I think should cause everyone to stop, take a pause and ask themselves if they really know who Donald J. Trump is, what he stands for and whether or not we should really fear him or support him fully.

Trump seems on his surface to be a crass, simple-minded, egotistical, big talking, narcissist. Comparing his speech to Hitleresque is probably the most ignorant of comparisons. Hitler possessed an eloquence and personality that was enthralling enough to entrance a nation and emboldened a unified national view of the world. Donald Trump has no where near the speaking skills that Hitler had. If anyone in our political landscape possessed those kinds of speaking abilities, one would argue Obama is likely the most powerful speaker in American political history aside from maybe Abraham Lincoln, to which he was compared to early on in his political career.

Below the surface however, Trump is a deal maker, not a businessman. He’s a pitch-man, a negotiator and a pragmatist who wants to gain from any exchange. This can be a huge asset for our country, it’s liability is that he could fail to produce and live up to expectations leaving us with only what he could deliver between two uncompromising and incompatible isles of politics.

If the far-left is wrong about Trump and he is in fact not a racist, a bigot, or a fascist, then liberals across America will get short changed by missing the opportunity to actually negotiate their positions and do the very thing that Trump states is his objective, which is to unify the country and help us move toward a more perfect union.

A lot will be written about the inauguration speech(full text), it’s lack of eloquence or poetry, it’s simplistic rhetoric, dark tone and forceful nature. The one thing that is truly unavoidable is that Trump, from his first day in office has established that he is willing to do things differently than business as usual. The theme of his speech, “America First”, hearkens back to Woodrow Wilson’s 1916 presidential campaign with principles that put American interests before international, globalist interests and challenges both parties to be more accountable to the people they govern.

So the real question will remain, if Trump, as he says, is returning power to the people, then what are you going to do with that power? Power is only meaningful when it is used. To what end will your power be used?

Trump’s 100 First Days – Citizen Log: Prelude

Much of my life has been dedicated to trying to understand the world I live in. As a technologist, it’s fundamentally important to understand the scope of the human condition if you want to develop tools to enable it to progress. Part of that is understanding how we govern ourselves and one another.

Today, for better or for worse, marks what is actually a significant day in the history of that process. Today begins the first 100 of what will, at least is expected to be 1,472 days of a government administration under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. So I have decided that this deserves a bit of my own personal and completely inconsequential perspective. Why? Because for most of my own journey through the process of understanding the political landscape I have been someone who has had a tendency to explore ideologies and sociological views in ways that most people do not and maybe my experiences and perspectives can help you come to your own conclusions.

So before we begin, let’s flashback to January 20th, 1993 when our POTUS was Bill Clinton. Having grown up in an unabashedly conservative Republican household, that was patriotic enough to use our home as a local poling place, I was, without a doubt far more involved in politics than most my age. I know this because finding people my age to even discuss politics with was near impossible unless of course it was in the smoke filled, dimly lit rooms of the southern California club scene after a punk rock show or the patio of some now long gone coffee house.

I remember the overwhelming sense of hope and potential for things actually being different. My personally disenfranchised and depressingly oppressive upbringing as the son of a minister being the the only white kid in a nearly all-black church, living in a mostly Asian neighborhood always left me feeling like a black sheep. I was the token white kid who didn’t really know what it was to be a white kid. I was, for all intensive purposes, a kid who grew up constantly part of some minority group. The experience pushed me to read a lot and as a result I became fluent in a wide range of political ideologies, especially Marxism, as any intellectual, self educated, punk rocker might have been.

As the dreams of a music career dwindled and the reality of being a graphics artist gave way to the reality of it, I began a journey not only into technology but another one in philosophy. My own socialistic principles became challenged and themselves transformed, slowly but steadily into what one would call classic liberalism. My love of history however began to create a personal conflict with my new found occupation and career path in life having found myself a job working as an information security specialist and multi-media engineer for a defense contractor. Working on a daily basis in the industry of Nuclear Missile Defense and Theater Missile Defense will give you what is called; perspective.

As a result, I ended up reading a lot of the writings of the founding fathers, readings like Common Sense, the Republic of Letters and many more. This was truly when I began to think like a Libertarian even if I hadn’t fully understood it at the time. Issues like Clinton’s support for NAFTA, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act as well as the Kyoto Protocol began to present a view of the world that was something that I believe now, was part of the very real fears that our founding fathers had even in their time.

Then came the Dot Com Boom and just as it’s inevitable bubble burst, there was 9/11, followed by it’s inevitable war, overwhelming social patriotism, the centralization of political power to the globalist movements supported by progressives in both parties. Let there be no confusion, progressives, at their core are socialists Marxists who ultimately believe in the value of a globalized government, which can only occur with the ultimate demise of the existing form of government which traditional American’s believe in. I can say this with certainty because it was that very ideal that I had turned away from when I began to realize the totalitarian result that is the inevitable method of that kind of government.

George W. Bush took office under the premise to end “Nation Building” but the realities of conducting a Global War on Terror were incompatible with those ideals and the ideals of the progressives within the Republican party and their objectives of a New World Order. Now this was, at the time, a clearly conspiracy theorist point of view. I spent the better part of a decade going from being dismissed as a far leftist to a conspiracy theorist. Then came the economic crash of 2007 and globalism, the World Bank and the globalist economy began to falter. The cat was, in a sense, not only out of the bag but the politicians were trying very hard to put them back in.

Unable to do so, Barack Obama took his message of Hope and Change to the people, promising to end the era of conservative, globalist agenda and fundamentally transform America into the progressive ideal of a global member state. In reality, Obama was only really different from Bush in that he simply did much of the same thing and doubled down on it. Obama raised taxes, increased health care costs, increased the national debt. He did nothing about the decline of our aging infrastructure. Immigration reform was simply another promise as it had been for over 30 years. long-term unemployment as a result of NAFTA and technological creative destruction was misdirected to short-term employment subsidies and an increase in our dependency on internationalism and support for the globalist agenda over the interests of our citizenry. Obama failed to win the Global War on Terror despite dropping more bombs than Bush and increasing drone assassinations, enabling the rise of ISIS in the void left behind by Al-Qaeda and a destabilized Middle East.

Polarity has become the theme of nearly every aspect of society in America. Rhetoric on both sides of the isle largely revolve around charges of racism, sexism, corruption, giving rise to a new version of Goodwin’s Law, which itself is almost evidence enough that the public discourse itself has degraded in both substance and substantiation. It’s not surprising that given the public’s ignorance eventually created the demand that Goodwin’s Law worked it’s way into the mainstream media itself. After all, if racism, sexism and every other form of bigotry doesn’t defeat your socio-political opponent, why not use Hitler to paint your enemy as evil?

I however, simply do not see it. I have followed Trump’s campaign. I’m not a supporter, nor did I vote for him, but not for the reasons that he’s a misogynist, a bigot, a fascist or Russian puppet. I didn’t vote for him for a very simple reason, the National Debt. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton either. But just because I didn’t vote for him doesn’t mean he isn’t my President. He is, for better or for worse, the leader of our country and I believe, if a person actually sets aside the highly out-of-context, polarized, hyperbolic, personal attacks against Trump and actually looks at his policies they will find something very different than they have likely been led to believe.

I’m going to try and keep an open mind and look at the issues as they come. Let’s see what happens.